I'm used to a little involuntary eye-brow twitching whenever I peruse Friedman's pontifications, but his latest effort had me spewing my breakfast muffin clear across the kitchen. After a trillion dollars wasted, after thousands of American lives wasted, after hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives wasted, after laying waste to an entire nation, we are told that America is in Iraq as a "neutral arbiter" making a "herculean mediation effort" in order that the delicate shoots of democracy may take hold in that benighted land. (The New Hama Rules.)
Well fuck me.
Is the myth-making machinery so far removed from the facts on the ground that the Times actually thinks they can print something this stupid? Really, Mr. Friedman, you are taking turd-polishing to unseemly heights with this one. This would make Joseph Goebbels blush.
Call Iraq what it is; an unmitigated, inexcusable, criminal and immoral disaster from top to bottom and from start to nowhere-in-sight finish. America needs to come to terms with her responsibility for this disaster. What went wrong, why, who is responsible and why aren't they sitting in cells in The Hague are questions we would do well to answer.
Trying to tart up reality by painting Iraq as an exercise in benevolent American altruism is beyond dishonest.
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